Tat Sires, mayor of New Albin, says the border city has to depend on itself because it's far away from the political center of the state.  Sires stands in front of the town's latest controversy, whether to tear down the original 1895 town hall, or preserve it for history.

TOWN LIKES LIFE ON THE EDGE
Article and photo by Donna Lee Olson, Gazette Eastern Iowa reporter

NEW ALBIN -- The last little town in the northeast corner of Iowa is New Albin. But please don't say it that way to the town's mayor, Tat Sires. "No, you've got that in the revierse. We're the first town in Iowa". Tat, 72, drawls as he leans back in his chair. The air conditioning's on in his office, and it's cutting the heat pushing up the Mississippi River valley and blanketing this Allamakee County town of 609. To the mayor it may be Iowa's first town. But for some, living on the edge of the state is like living in a political twilight zone, according [to] City Clerk Henry Becker, who often travels down to Des Moines to remind them that this borderline city needs state funding, too.

Take a short stroll north and west of Tat's Main Street office and you're in Minnesota. Drive around the hills to nearby Eitzen and you're meandering back and forth over the state line. To the east of New Albin is the Mississippi River and the state of Wisconsin on the other bank.

Folks in the New Albin cemetery don't have to worry about where they rest. They're just inside the Iowa state line which hasn't changed since 1849. That's the year Captain Thomas Jefferson Lee planted the post located across from the Iowa city's water treatment plant. On one side of the silver pylon is the latitude and longitude, another says "Iowa" and a third side, "Minesota," misspelled with just one "n," to the chagrin of the northern neighbors.

Everyone in the Iowa town knows about their historic marker and the state line. But at the East Side Tavern, there's still a little debate over who comes from where. Dick Kubitz, a local dairy farmer, works on a beer at the tavern counter while he explains the mix up. "I live in Minnesota and I have an Iowa address. I have a Minnesota driver's license and an Iowa telephone number," he says. "And I go to the doctor in Wisconsin." The 55-year-old man votes in Minnesota yet prefers arguing New Albin, Iowa, politics. "I say I'm from New Albin," Kubitz says. "But when you get down to legal, I say I'm from Rural Route 1, Houston County, Minnesota."

Area citizens insist they take the state line confusion in stride. After all, neighbors are neighbors and they wave at you the same on either side of the line. Sometimes, it's more fun not to let on where you're from. Iowan Eleanor Freilinger, 55, tells about the television crew who drove a half hour last winter from La Crosse, Wis., to New Albin to do a story about the Iowa caucuses. The crew swept through the tavern and the cafe next door, talking to local customers who were happy to be interviewed. Satisfied, the crew left with their story about how Iowans feel about politics. "Most of the people they interviewed," Eleanor said, "were from Minnesota."

At the East Side Cafe, owner Jerry Plagge hears Minnesota and Iowa jokes passed between tables over coffee. But everyone gets along, anyway. "People within 20 miles of the area are all the same," he said. The people, Plagge described, are mostly "farmers or kick-back types, living from one day to the next." If they have time to kick back and dock their fishing boats up and down the Mississippi River, they might have to buy fishing licenses from two or three states. That's one of several hassles that comes with living on the border, said Henry Becker.

Licenses are a minor problem compared to business people and those who work across the line. A tri-state operator might have to fill out tax forms in triple triplicate. It's that three state cross-over of lifestyle, Becker explains, that holds back some state funding. Legislators in Des Moines fear that some projects might be used by the local New Albin-Minnesota people rather than strictly Iowa residents. "You feel like you're in No Man's Land because no one wants to claim you," Becker complains. "Iowa likes its taxes, but the city doesn't get services." But in one way, Becker, Mayor Sires and others like the idea that they are the farthest Iowa city in the state -- about 300 miles -- away from the state Capital. "Out of sight, out of mind" they say of governmental pressures.

To survive, people along Iowa's first frontier use the pioneer tactics of fending for themselves. New streets were laid a few years ago, and they are all paid off without a bond issue or a loan. A combination city hall, fire station and library was built in the late 1960s in the same way. There's no funeral home or meeting hall in town, so the New Albin's Savings Bank built a "Town House and Chapel" for its city. For only $10 rent a night, people can hold a wake service or a senior citizen's party or a baby shower.

Ask Tat Sires why the town in the corner pocket seems to hold its own in services, and he talks about teamwork. "We have no educated people in our group" on the council, he says, "But we have sound reasoning." Tat's been in New Albin politics for 42 years, split between councilman and mayor. Ask him any question and his answers are down to the year and transaction. "We're not exactly a 100 percent Iowa town. We own five acres in Minnesota," he says and his grin widens. The five acres, bought in 1953, were used as a town dump for a time. A "sanitary landfill" corrects Tat.

He can tell you other things, like names and dates and where the Iowa border starts and stops on the ridge of hill crowding the town. But who in New Albin really things about boundaries or who lives where on a hot summer day in the first little town in Iowa? "There's no difference in my language," Tat says. "To me the state line is an imaginary line. You can see it if you wish."

-source: Undated (mid-late 1980's) Gazette Eastern Iowa newspaper clipping
-contributed by Errin Wilker

One Little Nuclear Plant Doesn't Bother This Little Town
By John McCormick

New Albin, Iowa -- Dick Gaynor is one happy little bureaucrat whenever his job yanks him out of Des Moines and brings him here to Iowa's most northeastern community. "It's a nice town. They're nice people, too," says Gaynor. "I was raised up in Fayette, Iowa, so when I'm in New Albin, we all talk with the same accent. They don't get awfully worried when they see me coming." That is not a luxury Dick Gaynor always enjoys during his travels. He is 55 and carries the weighty title of nuclear civil protection planner for the Iowa Office of Disaster Services. Some people see Gaynor coming and figure that a cloud of radioactivity must be right on his heels. In fact, what brings people like Dick Gaynor to places like New Albin is the possibility that somebody else's cloud of radioactivity might come calling.

Gaynor spends much of his time fretting about the 160,000 Iowans who live within 10 miles of the nuclear power plants at Cordova, llinois, on the Mississippi River; at Ft. Calhoun, Nebraska, on the Missouri River, and at Palo, Iowa, northwest of Cedar Rapids. Last January, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission insisted that local and state officials across the nation upgrade their plans for evacuating people living inside those 10-mile-radius circles, which are called Emergency Planning Zones. That has meant lots of headaches for Gaynor, who must worry about getting great gobs of people from here to there. But the place least likely to worry him is New Albin, a sublime little place resting between the Mississippi River and a lush, green bluff. New Albin, age 87, is not part of those three big Emergency Planning Zones that blanket parts of Iowa. In fact, New Albin is geographically remote from almost everything else in Iowa. Only a few marshes and the river channel separate the town from Wisconsin on the east, and on the north, the city limits also mark the Iowa-Minnesota state line. But New Albin does sit just downstream from the Genoa Boiling Water Reactor, a nuclear power plant operated in Genoa, Wisconsin, by the Dairyland Power Cooperative of La Crosse.

The 13-year-old Genoa plant ranks as America's smallest commercial reactor. It has a generating capacity of 50 megawatts; other reactors now being built elsewhere in the U.S. range in capacity up to 1,300 megawatts. Genoa's plant is considered so tiny by the NRC that its Emergency Planning Zone is required to extend only five miles in every direction. This five-mile zone includes less than one square mile of Iowa. But New Albin sits in that less-than-one-square-mile plot of ground. So the forces of local, county and state government have been gathering here to hash out the details of a brand-new evacuation plan. It would move all of New Albin's residents 11 miles south to safety at Lansing, Iowa, in the event of big problems at Genoa.

Folks take things like this rather calmly in the far reaches of northeast Iowa. No muss, no fuss. About the only thing that hasn't yet been settled is the question of who'll bring along the checker board and the euchre deck if Genoa's reactor goes haywire. "This is kind of an old-time, one-horse town," says New Albin Mayor Raymond "Tat" Sires, an oil distributor. "We're a team. If we ever have to pick up and go to Lansing, we'll just go ahead and do it." Tat Sires is 64. He was a New Albin councilman from 1947 to 1968, and he's been mayor ever since. Tat says the local electorate figures that "we shouldn't change officials every couple of years. We put a man in office and let him die there." Tat also says people have become aware of things nuclear since last year's big-time accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. But the threat of radioactive holocaust doesn't occupy the top spot on his agenda.

Tat Sires

"About 10 years ago, we practiced an evacuation of the town for some reason or other. Took us about an hour and a half. We've got a darned good fire department to handle things like that." Tat figures New Albin could handle a real evaluation as easily as it handled its garbage crisis in the 1950's. New Albin needed a place to put its dump back then. So the city bought four acres up in Minnesota and dumped to its heart's delight. Minnesota eventually said no thanks, so now New Albin's trash is hauled to a landfill over in Wisconsin. "We're great for hauling our garbage out of state," Mayor Sires says.

"We just handle all our problems as they come up. Take this evacuation plan. It's really no great amount of trouble." Tat's friend, Floyd Pottratz, says he agrees with that assessment. Floyd lives in New Albin, he's a former county supervisor, and since May 1 he's been Allamakee County's disaster services director. "After our first meeting about all this, we could have evacuated right on the spot," says Floyd, also 64. "Up here, we're all one happy family." Floyd Pottratz wrote up an account of that first meeting for the Waukon Republican-Standard newspaper. He mentioned that folks around here might have to move on down to the schools at Lansing in the event of a disaster at Genoa. And, to allay any fears of unneighborliness, he noted that "Ted Millard, mayor of Lansing, could not attend because of previous commitments, but assured those present that his office would make every effort to make a stay pleasant while hosting."

Folks who can't drive to Lansing would travel in school buses, says Floyd. Firefighters would go door-to-door making sure no one was left behind. And the county sheriff will mind things in New Albin by sealing off the town to keep out the looters. Lansing's Mayor Millard says that what he knows of the plan sounds fine to him, too. He guesses that most of the crowd from New Albin probably would be housed by their friends or relatives if they had to move into Lansing. "I'm essentially a foreigner in this area," says Millard, 63. "I've only been up here for 13 years. But everybody here gets along pretty well." If it sounds as though New Albin and Lansing are almost looking forward to an actual evacuation, Tat Sires will remind you that this is serious business. But one of his councilmen, 60-year-old Walt Breeser, tends to disagree. "I'm going to stay right here in New Albin," says Breeser. "If they leave me a couple quarts of good whisky, I'll be just fine."

Walt doesn't put much stock in all this talk about radioactivity. "Besides," he says with a grin, "If anybody actually had to live in a Lansing gymnasium with all their fellow townspeople for a few days, they'd probably wish the atomic power would come and get them." Over at the High Chaparall, owner Herb Schwenker, 57, represents the middle ground in all of this. Schwenker has heard little talk of the evacuation plan from customers in his place of business, which he describes as "an old farmer's bar, headquarters for hunters, fishermen and other liars." "When your time's up, your time's up," says Schwenker. "Personally, I don't worry too much about all of this. Instead, we ought to be concerned about gettin' the younger generation off all this damn dope. I bet if you asked a thousand people here whether there's a nuclear plant across the river, half of them wouldn't even know." Herb might be right, but he'd have to import 356 people to get the thousand to win his bet. New Albin's population is just 644. That, in turn, is about half of Lansing's.

Back in Des Moines, Dick Gaynor and his colleagues at the Office of Disaster Services are thankful that somebody -- anybody -- can retain a semblance of good humor when the emotion-packed subject of evacuation gets mentioned. "Usually I get a little laugh when I tell folks they have to plan to house their pets somewhere if something happens, and that's about it," Gaynor says. "But up in New Albin, people just aren't terribly worried about living in a nuclear risk zone." Does Gaynor know whether New Albin's evacuation plan will include provisions for a checker board and a euchre deck? "I hope so," he says. "What else would people do with their time? "Well," he says, "I'm sure the taverns in Lansing would be happy to stay open."

Still, says Gaynor, Mayor Sires is correct when he calls the evacuation plan serious business. It is Gaynor's fondest hope that New Albin avoids whatever it is that an accident at Genoa could offer. But the precautions continue. On Wednesday morning, Tat Sires and Floyd Pottratz are scheduled to attend an emergency planning session at Genoa. Representatives of other communities in the power plant's risk zone also will attend. But no one in the room will be as calm as Tat and Floyd. That's the way they are, and that's the way New Albin wants them to be.

source: Telegraph Herald, Dubuque, Iowa, June 1980
-contributed by Errin Wilker

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